Rudy Giuliani announced Friday evening that his trip to Ukraine is off.
During an interview on Fox News, the Trump lawyer said he made the call to cancel the trip, which raised concerns about 2020 election meddling, due to what he claimed was a set-up.
“I will get out of it — in order to remove any political suggestion I will step back and I’ll just watch it unfold,” he said.
“No trip because I believe I was walking into a bunch of people, one of whom was already found to be involved on this, and I think this was a set up. The whole thing, by the way, is a set up. From the very beginning,” Giuliani added.
On Thursday it was revealed Giuliani planned to travel to Ukraine soon to encourage the incoming government to push forward with investigations that “will benefit” President Trump.
Speaking to the New York Times, Giuliani said he planned to visit Kiev and meet with president-elect Volodymyr Zelensky to ask that Ukraine pursue investigations into two matters: the origin of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the involvement of Joe Biden’s son in an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch. Last week Giuliani called for Biden to be investigated for a trip he made in 2016 when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Ukraine did not dismiss Viktor Shokin, the country’s then-prosecutor general. Biden’s son, Hunter, stood to gain financially from having Shokin removed.
Although Giuliani stressed that he did not intend to meddle in a campaign — Biden is now a 2020 candidate — Democrats raised concerns.
“Today, Giuliani admitted to seeking political help from a foreign power. Again. His defense: ‘We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation … Somebody could say it’s improper.’ Yes. It is. Immoral, unethical, unpatriotic and, now, standard procedure,” tweeted House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., went so far as to call for a Senate investigation.
Giuliani would not dismiss the possibility of getting involved in the Ukraine matter in the future.
“I don’t know, I will play it by ear. I will see what is going on. I am actually quite confident that the facts with regard to former vice president Joe Biden are so compelling there is no way he gets from here to the election without this being investigated,” he said.
Trump mentioned to Politico that he was “curious” to hear from Giuliani about the trip. “Certainly it would be an appropriate thing to speak to” Attorney General William Barr about it, Trump said in an interview that was published before Giuliani backed out of the excursion. “It could be a very big situation.”
Trump’s 2016 campaign was the subject of a years-long investigation of Russian interference that wrapped up this year. Special counsel Robert Mueller was unable to turn up sufficient evidence to show criminal conspiracy between the Trump camp and the Kremlin.
